Q&A With Team that Produced "In the Family" Series

Q. What surprised you in the course of producing this work?

A. Susan Kinzie, reporter: The surprises are the best part of being a reporter. With this project it was amazing to me to see how the women reacted, what they learned as they went through some pretty horrible things. One sister, having survived a couple of rounds of cancer, said it was like suddenly being a little girl again, when everything was magic. Marcy Brenner told me: "The leaf petals, the ice-cream man, the jingle of my dad's change in his white bakery pants ... to trust, to have a childlike expectation that the love would always be there. ... I think I'm more alive now than most people."

Kristen Svingen, editor: The passion of everyone involved in the story, especially reporter Susan Kinzie. I was also deeply impressed by the degree of commitment and cooperation required to pull such an in-depth project together.

Susana Vera, photographer: The amazing strength of the women I had the fortune of photographing. They found the courage to seek knowledge that could set them free from a genetic fate, or on the contrary, trap them for the rest of their lives. Their determination was inspiring.

Q. What lessons did it teach that you'll apply to future work?

Susan Kinzie, reporter: This is a field with slippery statistics; doctors just don't really know yet exactly what these gene mutations mean in terms of the risk of getting a disease or how best to prevent it. So this story really hammered home that I always need to keep asking questions, keep pushing, keep looking for more sources of information. I talked to doctors and researchers and read studies from a bunch of places, asking lots of dumb questions until I really understood.

Kristen Svingen, editor: Stay organized. Seek out advice and input from everyone involved in the project. Listen, listen, listen.

Susana Vera, photographer: Having a close working relationship with the reporter, Susan Kinzie, was key. We talked about the series at length. All of that communication before, during and after the reporting phase made for a more successful outcome. It certainly helped my visual reporting because I had a very clear idea going into the story of what we were attempting to accomplish.

Q. What did you find most difficult or challenging about getting it done? How did you address that challenge?

A. Susan Kinzie, reporter: It was hard to learn the science thoroughly enough to try to write it in a clear, simple way. And it was hard to earn enough trust with the family that they would let me follow them through such intimate moments.

Kristen Svingen, editor: A lot of the really important work came as the stories were being conceived. How would we break down all this information? What form should the series take? How should the story be told? How do the different parts of the story relate to one another? What will the major themes be, and how will they be carried throughout the series? How will the characters be painted? All that conceptualizing was critical, and was for me the most intellectually challenging and fulfilling aspect of the whole endeavor.

Susana Vera, photographer: The biggest challenge was a geographical one. The fact that the sisters lived in different states meant that I was going to have a one-time opportunity to photograph them. That makes the job much harder. People don't have as much time to get used to the camera, to learn to forget you are there, to trust that you will portray them in a respectful way. There was more pressure on my part to capture more of their personality in a brief period of time, hoping that the subjects would display who they really were right away. Another challenge was the fact that a lot of the story had already taken place by the time we started it. It does't present such of a problem for reporters, especially if they are working with subjects who are capable of vivid recollection, but, for photographers, it's hard to report on something they were not there for. That means that the photographs they take in the present must have more of a symbolic quality. They must be photographs that not only speak of the current moment but evoke a time that is past, and in this case, the future that might be once they find out the results of the genetic testing. Fortunately, I had the incredible luck of photographing people who understood the story and what we needed to do. They are responsible for much of its success.

Q. What kind of response did you get from readers? What does that response suggest about how you'you'll work going forward?

A. Susan Kinzie, reporter: Reader response was overwhelming. I got so many letters and calls from people - many of them in tears - and the Brenners did, too. Some were wondering about cancer in their own families, some told me the story of how they got tested, some had questions about genetics, some just wanted to say they were inspired by the Brenners.

Kristen Svingen, editor: The volume of the response is part of what prompted us to run a follow-up story that let readers know what happened with Christine Morgan. At the end of the last story in the three-part series, readers were left with the image of Morgan getting her blood drawn for a genetic test. She had just learned that her mother, Linda Brenner-David, had tested positive for one of the gene mutations linked to breast cancer and that she might have inherited the mutation. Morgan, as it turned out, tested negative for both gene mutations associated with breast cancer.

Susana Vera, photographer: Readers responded quite positively to the story. As a photographer, it proved to me that there's a place for visual narrative in newspapers, because readers show us that they appreciate and understand quiet, non-literal photographs over and over again. I got comments from people who said they had been moved by the photograph of Linda, her daughter, and grandson at the genetics counseling session on the second day of the series and had gone to the Web to read the first part of the series to find out what was going on with that family. This inspires me to keep devoting time to telling more involved, visual stories that can touch the readers.